Machine type communication is increasingly used in cellular access networks, as well as in information and telecommunications systems in general. Examples of systems using machine type communication devices for machine type communication operations include:    remotely controlled power meters as well as metering machine type communication devices,    remotely controlled machine type communication devices for controlling functions e.g. in a home which make it possible to turn heating on prior to arriving home.
In addition to such examples of stationary machine type communication, there are also applications of mobile machine type communication, such as remotely monitoring and/or controlling functions or status information in a car, boat, or some other kind of vehicle.
Due to the vast amount of possible applications for machine type communication, machine type communication devices and machine type communication systems, a significant increase in signaling traffic and in data traffic in cellular access systems can be expected.
Release 10 of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP Rel-10) refers to applications or scenarios of machine type communication (or machine to machine communication (M2M communication) scenarios) and typically defines a plurality of machine type communication devices which are controlled by a machine type communication server. The machine type communication server is a functional entity that is either part of the mobile communication network or which is located outside of the mobile communication network (belonging or operated by a machine to machine service provider) to which the machine type communication devices are connected or with which the machine type communication devices communicate.
A typical machine type communication device is connected through cellular access networks to mobile communication networks, the access networks including typically GSM (Global System of Mobile Communication) access networks, GPRS (General Packet Radio System) access networks, and/or EPS/LTE (Evolved Packet System/Long Term Evolution) access networks. The application in which a machine type communication device is used needs the machine type communication device to report data, or it may happen that the machine type communication server needs to transmit data to the machine type communication device.
Machine type communication devices tend to access the mobile communication network or transmit data at the same time, i.e. in a synchronized fashion.
User equipments generally and machine type communication devices in particular, used in a cellular mobile communication networks such as GPRS (General Packet Radio System), EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), UMTS (Universal Mobile telecommunications System), HSDPA, HSUPA, or LTE (Long Term Evolution) make use of a random access procedure (e.g. usage of the Random Access Channel (RACH)) to gain access to the mobile communication network. In addition to this, machine type communication devices may use RACH (Random Access Channel) to transmit small amounts of data in UMTS. According to the standard procedure, user equipments in UMTS randomly choose a signature from a group of broadcast signatures and attempt to access the network in some predefined slots. It is quite likely that a large number of machine type communication devices are present in one cell and they are all configured to access the mobile communication network in a synchronized fashion. The probability of RACH access collisions or contentions is quite high and consequently network resources would be overwhelmed.
Furthermore, in a scenario of using connectivity of a UMTS mobile communication network, user equipments that are already in connected mode (i.e. listening to the paging channel of the respective radio cell (Cell-PCH)), an analogous scenario is applied in order to transmit data, namely to access a random access resource of the UMTS cell. In this scenario, in case of a high number of devices wishing to transmit (e.g. 100 devices), the devices are likely to contend for the same random access resources (e.g. Random Access Channel (RACH)), and this contention would not only result in failure for some of the devices in obtaining cell resources but also overwhelm the cell making it difficult for any other device (i.e. machine type communication devices as well as conventional user equipments) for accessing the network resources.
This synchronized access is a known problem with conventional systems. There are existing approaches to deal with random access messages from different user equipments, such as access class barring or the like. However, this mechanism is involves network signaling which requires devices to be in an on-state resulting in additional energy consumption. Such a situation is unwanted for devices which obtain their power from a battery source.